Author: Jeremiadus

The most important question the Alabama Senate election on December 12 will answer is not: Do Alabama voters care more about abortion or pedophilia?

The most important question the Alabama Senate election on December 12 will answer is: Do Alabama voters care that Roy Moore is an embarrasment to the state?

In other words, Alabama voters must decide: How low will you go?

Abortion and pedophilia themes in this election are emotionally volatile symbols (mostly as vectors of our inner lives, not directly connected to social reality in any meaningful sense) that crowd out debate about the issues that truly do matter in the lives of most Alabama residents. These culture war themes are not irrelevant or unimportant. But they are a small part of a larger conversation, and absolutely should not be tent-pole factors in the outcome of the election.

On issues that matter in this larger conversation – laws and policies governing: taxes, spending priorities, health-care access, reproductive rights, gender and racial equity, immigration policy, environmental protection, foreign policy and diplomacy, national infrastructure, and science and technology investment – Doug Jones and Roy Moore will shape debate and cast votes that are pivotal to the fortunes and the future of Alabama residents and of the United States.

On all of these issues, Doug Jones will be informed and thoughtful. He will not be exciting. Flames will not burst from his ass. But his track record, his “body of work” (as sports analysts like to say), gives us confidence he will reclaim for the Senate some dignity and some policy relevance. By contrast, Roy Moore is an empty suit, an ignoramus who takes pride in his lack of interest in and knowledge of policy matters, and in his lack of concern for the history and significance of the U.S. Senate as an institution.

As a U.S. senator, Roy Moore would not debate or deliberate. He would not inform himself, for in his mind, he has long known everything he or anyone else needs to know – that the Bible contains all truth and is a sufficient basis for making all decisions concerning policy and principle. As a U.S. senator, Roy Moore will stand and fulminate. He will raise high his Bible. He will cite the 10 Commandments. And in his pride and arrogance, he will bring the Senate, as an institution, to its knees.

With respect, then, to this conversation about laws and policies that directly affect the lives of all Americans, the election of Roy Moore would indicate that Alabama voters are prepared to go very low, indeed. But there is more to consider – or perhaps (in the spirit of going low) less to consider.

In his bravura performance as president, Donald Trump has already transformed the United States into a global punch line. Alabama voters know this. They elected him by a margin of 28 percent over Hillary Clinton. A vast (although declining) majority of the state still supports Trump personally and approve of his sub-fuhrer style as president.

With their support for Trump alone, one might conclude a large number of Alabama voters have no shame. But the election of Roy Moore would carry Alabama to depths previously unexplored in the capacity of a state to revel in its own pathos. And personally, I do not believe Alabama is capable of this descent, an existential slipping of the gears that leaves us that much closer to free-fall as a nation.

One theory to support this view is that Alabama voters, like many elsewhere, mostly voted against Hillary Clinton rather than for Donald Trump. A vote against Hillary of coure offers no evidence that matters of policy and principle much concern these voters, of course, but such a vote nonetheless indicates that Trump’s appeal may largely derive from his novelty, that he is a new and shiny object to gaze upon and admire.

Alabama voters already know Roy Moore. He is not new and shiny. He is already a pustulating pimple on the rear end of the state, with support from its hinterlands, but a style and a “body of work” that has long been a source of distress and consternation to many in the state. The most recent sexual predator allegations only surface and reinforce an awareness of Roy Moore’s creepiness that has already been long-acknowledged and understood by people in Alabama.

For these reasons, my hunch is that Alabama voters will choose not to take that next step toward perdition and inflict Roy Moore upon the entire nation.

The crudest presumptions of natural law theory still inform our political and cultural conflicts. In recent posts, I’ve focused on the logical and moral contortions a focus on creator worship as the ground of our being requires of revealed religions. Alabama’s Republican Party offers the most recent permutations of this bizarre fever dream.

On Tuesday, former (twice!) Alabama state Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore (with a rich symbolism perhaps not fully appreciated) rode his horse Sassy into the unincorporated town of Gallant (population 850, also known as Greasy Cove) to cast a ballot for himself as the Republican nominee for the Senate seat vacated by Jeff Sessions.

In the wake of a backlash against “DC swamp” candidate Luther Strange, Moore coasted to a win over nine other candidates, and will once again face (the geographically vast, awesomely named) Strange in a late-September run-off primary. As Senator, Moore promises to restore Christianity to the Capitol and fight the rise of Islamic “Sharia law” in the United States, commitments presumably of little significance to Strange, a former oil industry lobbyist.

While it’s tempting to linger on the incredible Gothic theatricality of this event (for example, the mixed metaphors of “the swamp” as the habitation of the “silk-stockinged elite“), for our purposes, we need initially only pay attention to Moore’s deranged, megalomaniacal Constitutional rants, which begin with the Bible, linger around themes such as God’s desire for families to keep loaded guns at home to protect their children, and end with the natural law gymnastics of early 19th-century Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story.

Moore’s jurisprudence and politics fully conform to the conservative commitment to natural law as a gift and instrument of God via revelation. “I’m not a politician. I don’t like politics,” Moore told a gathering of elderly white folks at Mr. Fang’s Chinese Restaurant on the night before the primary vote. “It’s what God has done through me.”

In a conversation that evening with Jeff Stein of Vox, Moore emphasized, repeatedly, “You have to understand what religion is — the duties you owe to the creator.” According to Moore, Justice Story, one of the most highly regarded jurists of the early Republic who in recent years has become, somewhat surprisingly, a fan favorite of legal conservatives and natural law enthusiasts, supported and refined the view that the duty of the Constitution and the First Amendment was to “foster religion and foster Christianity.”

Here, Roy Moore parses a view of religious liberty consistent with the precepts of Robby George, the Acton Institute, and other conservative Christians for whom conscience becomes the principled basis for ignoring legislation, regulation, and court decisions of the federal government with which they disagree on the basis of the “self-evident” precepts of natural law. Of course, this parsing has long formed the hallmark of Roy Moore as a jurist, with his placement of the stone tablets of the Decalogue in the Alabama state courthouse and his refusal to enforce the marriage equality ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court (with helpful cover from Antonin Scalia’s high court dissent and full-throated support from Robby George).

Roy Moore, quoting from Joseph Story’s Commentaries on the Constitution, has for several decades been instructing us that “the rights of conscience are beyond the reach of any human power; they are given by God and cannot be encroached on by any human authority without a criminal disobedience of the precepts of natural or revealed religion.” On Senate primary election night, with a flourish characteristic of the natural law synthesis initially formulated by Aquinas, Moore concluded, “We need to go back to the recognition that God’s hand is still on this country and on this campaign. We must be good again before we can be great. And we will never be good without God.”

Christian-conservative jurists and philosophers will often invoke Abraham Lincoln’s response to the Dred Scott decision as the ultimate defense of conscience in response to judicial overreach. In reality, these appeals to conscience and religious liberty are, like patriotism, a last refuge of scoundrels. Arguments on behalf of conscience, natural law, and higher law – whether voiced by Antonin Scalia, Robby George, or Roy Moore – mask a theocratically minded support for states’ rights that both dissolves the foundations of nationhood and obliterates the rights of conscience when they fail the arbitrary test of Biblical authenticity.

This essay traces the arc within movement conservatism in the United States from Steve Bannon, Chief Strategist to President Donald Trump (and arguably the most reviled and feared conservative political actor in American public life) to Robby George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University (and arguably the most respected and influential conservative political thinker in American public life).

Stylistic and intellectual differences between Bannon and George, real though they may be, cannot obscure the common ground they share regarding both the sources and the implications of their ideas, specifically those ideas pertaining to Catholic (or Thomist) natural law. While neither might relish the comparison, the relationship between Steve Bannon and Robby George is the relationship between messenger and message, between musical prelude and orchestral suite.

The Messenger and the Message

Irish-Catholic Steve Bannon embeds in the White House an emotionally manipulative, threat-driven sensibility, with methods and antics that echo the methods and antics of Irish-Catholic Senator Joseph McCarthy (and, more recently, two fellow Nixonians, Irish Catholic nationalist Pat Buchanan and Catholic agitprop maestro Roger Stone). A sensibility, and a set of methods that are politically effective and destructive, but inherently unstable and unsustainable. For this reason, Bannon’s intellectually suspect flirtations – with Catholic mystics, fringe historians, and prophets of apocalypse – probably also entomb him politically, alongside fellow Irish-Catholic street brawlers, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, for whom success is ultimately about insurgency, about blowing up things, which means, ultimately, that one blows up oneself.

Put another way, Steve Bannon is all about tactics. An architecture of assumptions scaled to the existential stakes of our current moment in time might therefore tell us that Bannon is epiphenomenal. He is only the messenger. He is not the message. Bannon’s talents for political mayhem have surfaced and brought into more clear relief the remarkable influence of idea-driven institutions such as the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society around and through which American political conservatism has built itself into the dominant force in contemporary American politics. Catholic-powered ideas about natural law provide the most enduring and consistent thread of thought at the most high-profile and well-funded conservative think tanks and foundations. As the leading philosopher of Thomist natural law on the American political scene, Robby George most clearly articulates and contains within himself the distilled message and the intellectual contradictions of these institutions.

The Catholic Moment

Roman Catholic influence in American politics has mushroomed in the past 40 years, specifically in response to the crisis engendered by the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, but more generally as an organizational and intellectual presence best evolved to exploit and respond the cultural uncertainty and flux of our times. The precepts of Roman Catholic theology – specifically (although not exclusively) with regard to the human life / human dignity issues associated with reproductive politics – now interpenetrate conservative American political thought and nearly every political institution of consequence, including the Republican Party, Congress, the White House, the military, and the media.

Five Catholics serve as justices on the Supreme Court. A sixth, Neil Gorsuch, is a formerly devout Catholic who now worships as an Episcopalian. Antonin Scalia, the justice Gorsuch replaced, was of course also Catholic. Which means seven of the most recent ten justices have a Catholic background (with Episcopalian identification one shade of gray removed from Catholicism). Prior to the appointment of Antonin Scalia to the Supreme Court in 1986, only six of the previous 103 justices serving the previous 197 years of the Court’s history had been Catholic (the first being Roger Taney, appointed by Andrew Jackson in 1836).

None of this happened by accident. The hegemony of Puritan/Protestant ideas/ideals in American history always masked a specific organizational weakness. We can presume this organizational deficit is dispositionally endemic to fractional/fractious religious movements. In the case of American cultural formations associated with Protestantism, we can also speculate this institutional insufficiency was reinforced by the omnipresent option – dating back to the settlement patterns of 16th-century Protestant sects – to separate, to drift, to disperse, to migrate. Or as Albert Hirschman’s paradigm might suggest, to exit. This weakness the Articles of Confederation expressed politically and the Constitution and doctrines of federalism barely masked.

American Catholics lacked both the recursive instincts to fractionalize of post-Reformation Protestantism and many of the first mover settlement options of Protestant sects and communities that preceded the arrival to the United States of Catholic immigrants. But American Catholicism possessed a latent advantage that proved to be enormously functional in the decades following World War II, when economic growth and global reach allowed American Catholics to attain business and financial prominence and political influence that had previously eluded them. That latent advantage was organizational, a capacity integral to an enormously sophisticated, globally minded religious enterprise with centuries of experience building institutions and making theory practical via the law. And when theory – the systematic elaboration of ideas about cause and consequence – becomes practical and programmatic, it suddenly also becomes powerful.

(I) The Deconstruction of Steve Bannon

We can now assess the content and quality of the White House seep, the not-quite-movement conservatism upon which Donald Trump has risen to power, like a toad upon a geyser. This capacity to assess is a good thing, perhaps the only way we have, at least in the short term, to steer clear of emotional chaos activated by extrusions of Donald Trump’s fevered mind – incessant social media chatter, tabloid focus on personalities, shattered boundaries between personal and professional, a looming collective, paranoid psychosis.

I don’t personally know Steve Bannon or any of the other various satraps and factotums and acolytes who accompany this political movement and whose ideas now drive policy at many levels of government. But I do know that if we fear Donald Trump and Steve Bannon and the Republican majorities in the House and Senate and in most state governments, we need to focus less on who these people are as individuals (a major preoccupation for the click-driven media and an incredible waste of time for the rest of us) and more on what they want to do.

The Republican Party did not magically seize power. Trump’s election is only the latest – if most surreal – chapter of a slow-motion political creep on to land of a hyper-conservative Republican sea monster. Those scared shitless by Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, Scott Pruitt, Betsy DeVos, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, Charles Koch, Robert Mercer, Peter Thiel, et. al. would do well to avert their gazes from the daily media squalls – in other words to stop reacting – and instead reclaim the initiative (and the future), with plans, roadmaps, and strategies that attend to the larger ideas, themes, and forces that shape our reality and determine our destiny. As citizens, we simply have to be more clear about our jobs, and our goals.

For me, the starting point is actually that, on many topics, these strange Tea Party people are almost right. They get just close enough. This is their genius. And their pathology. So it’s really important that we appreciate the meaning of their words, many of which are coded (or at least shibboleths for the initiated), and separate from those words that which is worth harvesting from that which is over-wrought, over-ripe, and toxic. Let’s break it down.

What follows is, by design and by necessity, an impressionistic rendering of the ideological landscape of American movement conservatism. There is nothing tidy or organized or logical or structured about this political movement. Journalists speak of the movement’s “intellectual source code,” and that is an apt and clever phrase, but as source code goes, it is bug-ridden and messy, potted with security holes, loaded with traps and loops. Given the mess, there is no real way to traverse or map this landscape of ideas without approaching it, and imagining it, as a whole that is far less than the sum of its parts. But the parts themselves – fragments and shards of ideas and impulses – are each in their own way fascinating and revealing and deserving of scrutiny on their own terms. We begin with Steve Bannon, Dark Enlightenment Sith Lord whose ideas and influence provide the single most coherent philosophical basis for considering the benighted path on which we now travel.

Gothic Moment

In “normal” times, politically, or at least in our schoolbook “consensus,” “pluralist,” or “interest group” images of politics, the center holds because ultimately it is in the interest of politicians, and political parties, and the organizations and groups and populations they represent, to compromise, take half a loaf, that they may live to fight another day. The premise of pluralism is that people are pragmatic, not idealistic, and that bargaining and deal-making can hold together the nation because most people are fundamentally alike, at least in the sense that they speak the same language and can build trust around their understanding of what words mean and how they represent the world, at least that part of it which is up for grabs. These notions are the mother’s milk of our citizen identity, reinforced historically and culturally through our political and civic associations (including media), common law traditions, and Enlightenment values (see Alexis de Tocqueville, Louis Hartz, etc.).

The strength (and weakness) of these political habits and beliefs is that they are process-driven, not outcome-driven. We associate Enlightenment ideals of representative democracy, individual freedom, legal equality, and political justice with rule-driven attributes and standards of process fairness, consistency, and coherence. The container matters more than the content. Whether naïve or not – (Hello, Indian Removal? Slavery? Incarceration Nation?) (on this 250th anniversary of Andrew Jackson’s birth?) – this liberal political culture owes an enormous amount to the historically specific claims of the Enlightenment, in combination with English common law traditions, on the American founders. When you read The Federalist, despite the significant and meaningful differences in the political visions of Madison and Hamilton, and between the Federalists and the Antifederalists, all parties communicate a deeply rooted commitment to the shared identity of humans bound together and lifted up by a capacity to reason, employ logic, deduce consequences, gather evidence, and share knowledge. Baseline commitments to process (and progress) within our political culture depend on the Enlightenment assumption of epistemic coherence, that knowledge about the world objectively exists, and that we can discover and share this knowledge with each other.

The problem is that when we experience abnormal or disjunctive political moments – such as 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina or Wall Street run amok – we discover the process coefficient breaks down and epistemic incoherence ensues. We become strangers to each other. Irruptions from below disclose a chaotic, Bosch-like underworld that disputes almost every dimension of the reality our political institutions take for granted and require – that our votes matter, that our efforts matter, that science matters, that government helps us more than it harms us, that media seeks and tells the truth. In those moments, unfairly disproportionate or unexpectedly unequal social outcomes shred the process container, and in the chaos that ensues we experience not simply the frailty of our political institutions, but the extent to which the rational Enlightenment vision on which they depend remains inaccessible and alien and threatening and illegitimate to vast layers and segments of the American population. At that moment, we no longer recognize ourselves.

Prairie Fire

National political campaigns are inherently toxic. We do elevate the image of Lincoln and Douglas speaking to thousands of white Illinois farmers and merchants, ex tempore, for hours at a time, debating legal and philosophical intricacies of sovereignty and citizenship. That is our template for civic engagement and political discourse. But in that time, as in our own, hidden below the patriotic bunting, the wooden decks of the speakers platforms, the muddied fields, muffled by the raucous cheers and jovial banter of these tent meeting huskings, beneath those honest images of rough democracy, the prairie fires burn hot through the soil. Truly, the Lincoln-Douglas debates were the exception that proves the rule regarding the savage intent and bitter leavings of the political contest. Politics is a bare-knuckled brawl.

On April 15, 2010, as (now old) New Left historian Ronald Radosh has reported in The Daily Beast, Steve Bannon delivered a rambunctious speech to a Tea Party rally in New York. On Tax Day (in the year the Republicans swept aside the Obama majority in the House, threatened its majority in the Senate, and rolled through the state legislatures like so many haystack twisters) Bannon unleashed a torrent of disdain for financial architects and political enablers of the Great Recession that had spun 15 percent of the nation into poverty and unraveled the lives of countless other millions caught on the pitchfork of mortgage arbitrage. While Occupy Wall Street would one year later voice similar contempt and outrage for the One Percent, Bannon’s assault on liberal elites assumes existential dimensions – the Goldman Sachs vampire squid as a cosmopolitan, many-tentacled agent of globalization that had sucked away, not simply the wealth of the middle class, but its sovereignty over the American Dream. The Tea Party, heirs to pre-revolutionary Boston Harbor anti-tax incendiaries, are those stolid, virtuous Americans – Bannon would call them his “hobbits” – who make the country work, “the beating heart of the greatest nation on earth.”

The politics and messaging here are slippery, but to properly position them Radosh isolates Bannon’s concluding remarks: “It doesn’t take a weatherman to see which way the wind blows, and the winds blow off the high plains of this country, through the prairie and lights a fire that will burn all the way to Washington in November.” As Radosh reminds us, Bannon (a committed Deadhead and Springsteen fan back in the day) is invoking phrasing from Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues, simultaneously invoking the revolutionary, system-shattering instincts of the Weather Underground, late-1960s insurgent and militant and violent spinoff of Students for a Democratic Society. Weather Underground members – Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, specifically – in 1974 published a book titled Prairie Fire that presented themselves as a guerrilla organization (“communist men and women underground in the United States”) committed to destroying American capitalism and the liberal state. Bannon’s language indicates the extent to which he associates the Tea Party with a similarly revolutionary, elite-stomping, state-smashing mission on behalf of America’s forgotten heartland hobbits.

Deep State

Steve Bannon’s radical instincts and Ayers allusions poignantly illustrate the disintegration of language as the common currency of our civic identity. Because of course, (the very non-radical and measured) Barack Obama’s very casual Chicago connection to Bill Ayers in the context of education policy discussions (Ayers became a beloved education professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Education) have become staples of right-wing flame-throwing (see this sampling from Breitbart), a turd-like reality which (the far more radical and subversive) Steve Bannon was obviously poking with his Prairie Fire reference. Beyond the Daily Beast article, this allusion has obtained no obvious traction with anyone on the right (or elsewhere, for that matter), an indication of the extent to which emotions have overwhelmed language and basically destroyed the capacity of words to in any meaningful way frame any public and shared concept of reality.

There are many ways to think about the impact of this bizarre surge of emotion into the public sphere (see a great historical instance of this phenomenon in Lessons From the Fake News Pandemic of 1942). But in our current historical moment, its significance is revelatory. Brooding, profane Irish Steve Bannon is radical because he does not believe in the Enlightenment project. His ideas and instincts are pre-Enlightenment, and so quite alien to the lenses we are accustomed to using for our imaginings about the American experience. I’m going to dive more deeply into Bannon’s intellectual influences. For now, suffice to say that these influences do not include Locke, Madison, Jefferson, or Lincoln. Politically speaking, Bannon is a traditional Catholic conservative (of the Mel Gibson variety) who is profoundly in tune with the darker demons of the human soul, a media Svengali skilled at orchestrating chaos and mayhem.

Our current titillation with the Deep State, working its dark arts from within US intelligence agencies, sheds light on Bannon’s quite remarkable political achievement, which has been (via Trump, Breitbart, and his documentaries) to rip away the rather bland and mechanical surface of American politics and expose its exotic underbelly, a quasi-medieval jurisprudential apparatus funded and supported by a varied group of wealthy and powerful free-market and socially conservative individuals and institutions, ranging from Charles Koch to Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke, but also encompassing canonically minded American judges, including Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas (and, formerly, Antonin Scalia). This version of the Deep State is not primarily a Protestant evangelical movement, which remains far more in the American grain than these elements in tune with Steve Bannon, for whom the currency of the land is not grace or justification, but power, the terrestrial control of both bodies and minds. To fully understand the intellectual foundations of this legal apparatus, we need to leave the Enlightenment and return to the world-historical vision of the medieval Christian church in its encounter with Islam.

(II) Bannon at the Vatican

In the summer of 2014, Steve Bannon delivered closing remarks to a conference on alleviating global poverty hosted by the Dignitatis Humanae Institute (DHI) in a small marble palace tucked deep within the Vatican. Bannon spoke via Skype from Los Angeles. This address came to the attention of the world in the days following the election in a Buzzfeed article entitled This is How Steve Bannon Sees the Entire World (you can listen to the unedited audio of the talk here).

There is both less and more than meets the eye in this Bannon speech. He is addressing DHI in his professional capacity as the Executive Chairman of Breitbart, and probably the most interesting insights emerge from Bannon’s assumption that Breitbart’s rising moment of nationalist, populist savagery conforms to the goals and worldview of an allegedly principled and philosophically pure Catholic lay organization with transnational aspirations. Let’s see how comfortably Bannon disports himself on this Bed of Procrustes (to invoke Nassim Nicholas Taleb, he of the Black Swan).

What is the Dignitatis Humanae Institute?

Dignitatis Humanae Institute (you can call it the Human Dignity Institute if you want) is a quirky lay Catholic NGO with ties to the European Parliament and the Vatican, based in Rome, and headed by Benjamin Harnwell, a converted Catholic and formerly active member of the British Conservative Party who identifies with the Austrian-Libertarian school of economics associated with Mises and Hayek. The DHI website profligately features a photo of Bannon informing us that “Harnwell’s the smartest guy in Rome. He’s always a tough guy – he comes across as a monk, but he’s actually a very tough guy.” Indeed (and weirdly), we can see some of that toughness, and a sense of the deeper political currents driving the DHI agenda, in a recent post from the Institute about “subversive external influences” in Macedonian civil society of “stateless meddler” and “cultural imperialist” George Soros (also republished in pro-Russian news agency, Eurasia Review – the doubling down on Soros conspiracy theories is much in the news these days).

Canon law fiduciary and flame-throwing Cardinal (and Pope Francis nemesis) Raymond Leo Burke serves as President of the DHI’s Advisory Board, and by way of promoting this relationship the DHI website shares with us Cardinal Burke’s long keynote before the First Annual Rome-Life Forum in May 2013. Salient themes of this speech for exposing the deeper structure of the Steve Bannon worldview include: 1) reverence for the divine essence within each human life (and human life only), as mediated by Jesus Christ (and Jesus Christ only); 2) disdain for rampant secularization (and dechristianization) in the world, characterized by spiritual emptiness, moral relativism, material hedonism (rule of the flesh), and a culture of death; and 3) evangelization of the “gospel of life” based on the “natural moral law.”

The bulk of Cardinal Burke’s speech/sermon concerns Natural Law, as the expression through which reason can comprehend, accept, and fulfill the responsibility to love, serve, defend, and promote human life, in Christ. To this pre-Enlightenment pillar of Catholic legal traditionalism we will later return. For now, it may suffice to note this distillation of Catholic traditional beliefs contains many profound and beautiful insights regarding our flawed, fallen, imperfect existence as human creatures, most specifically the oft-stated command and commitment to serve the least among us. But as we might expect, much of this language is also coded to capture a deeper, more hidden, and darker agenda which exploits the fraught intersection between human sexuality and human conception.

Bannon’s Brain

Let’s first dismiss an important misconception. Bannon is obviously smart (as those who know him report, “perhaps the smartest” in his Harvard Business School class, “the most well-read person in Washington,” the “Rain Man of nationalism,” devouring works of history and political theory “in like an hour”), but not evidently smarter than lots of people, and the media he savages and mocks has perhaps given him too much credit for reading real books and for having real ideas, presumably as a way to account for the visionary and prophetic alignment between the storyline in Bannon’s head prior to the election and the surprising and unexpected outcome that folded, in virtually every one of its details, into the narrative Bannon had foretold.

Now clearly there is a fair amount of post hoc ergo propter hoc going on in our retrospective accounts of what actually transpired (this Hollywood Reporter puff piece illustrates the point), and the reality of the cause and the effect will probably take decades to properly establish itself. At the moment, Bannon properly believes he has earned the right to own the narrative, and he and his compadres have been happy to bludgeon everyone else with his version of events, which conveniently anoints him, in a moment of establishment uncertainty, as a counter-culture sorcerer or soothsayer.

And perhaps he truly is. But as his fellow Wall Street Jeremiah, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, might remind Bannon, the world includes many more data points than any one person can account for, hence the rule of randomness in our lives. The face one sees in a cloud may quickly turn into something else entirely. Indeed, Bannon post-election reminds me of a horse race handicapper who scans a 12-horse field and then successfully places a single wager on the precise order of the first four finishers of a race. This person might well be a gifted handicapper, even the most gifted, but the odds that he could successfully impose his mental map of a race outcome on any given race between actual flesh-and-blood horses remains vanishingly small.

Bannon may indeed be a savant. But one would certainly not reach that conclusion from reading the transcript of his remarks to the Dignitatis Humanae Institute. These remarks, as it turns out, represent a hodgepodge of logically disconnected statements that, while in some cases individually plausible and compelling, are, taken together, neither historically accurate nor coherent at the level of narrative (or even myth), and are, moreover, morally challenged almost to the degree of being depraved.

The shards of truth that Bannon offers, sometimes spastically in this address, are absolutely not the basis for governing a vast and powerful nation at an historically and existentially pivotal moment. But these statements are – regarding the Church Militant, the New Barbarity, and History as a Reaping and a Sorting, as an apocalyptic succession of judgments – absolutely consistent with the backwards-looking, cruel and frozen perspective on human life, and on created life, consistent with natural law and with an authoritarian and top-down Catholic edifice that uses a concept of the Law Revealed to punish and sacrifice the small, marvelous creatures and creations of the world at the altar of an abstract and capricious all-mighty Creator whose “love”, whose “goodness”, more often than not feels like a savage indifference, premised perhaps on irony, but more likely on a cavernous emptiness that we fill with our own fevered dreams.

Capitalisms Good and Bad

At the Vatican, speaking before an audience focused on the material and spiritual nexus of poverty, Bannon threads the needle nicely with a trenchant overview of three kinds of capitalism and wealth creation, one of which is good and two of which are bad. The good kind of capitalism he refers to as “enlightened” capitalism, and while Bannon never clearly states precisely what he means by enlightened capitalism, one can easily deduce its outlines from its effects. Enlightened capitalism, when constructed properly, is a vehicle for the working class and the middle class of a society to receive fair rewards for their labor. In other words, the existence of a stable, prosperous, and growing middle class, bounded on one side by a constrained and docile (because yoked to the promise of entry themselves into the middle class) impoverished social layer, and on the other side by an animated and spirited (but not too animated or spirited) leadership class whose own success is somehow tied to the solvency of the middle-class dream. “That capitalism really generated tremendous wealth. And that wealth was really distributed among a middle class, a rising middle class, people who come from really working-class environments and created what we really call a Pax Americana. It was many, many years and decades of peace.”

The “bad” capitalisms – “crony” capitalism and “libertarian” capitalism – represent metastatic deviations from or corruptions of the Platonic ideal of enlightened middle-class capitalism. State-sponsored capitalism in China and Russia and crony capitalism in Argentina are “brutal” forms of capitalism where the many produce wealth for the few, where the system only benefits intersecting groups of political, business, and military elites and their families, and “doesn’t spread the tremendous value creation throughout broader distribution patterns that were seen really in the 20th century.” Ayn Rand style libertarian capitalism, toward which populist conservatives and younger people in the United States and Europe who favor “personal freedom” have gravitated, objectifies people as commodities who possess no intrinsic worth (here Bannon invokes Marx’s ideas about worker exploitation as mere production factors).

There is some epic confusion in this Bannon narrative about the species of capitalism. At one point in the speech, noting the centenary of the murder of Archduke Ferdinand that precipitated World War I, he characterizes the 20th century as an unprecedented catalog of carnage. Shortly thereafter, he invokes enlightened capitalism as the source of a global Pax Americana that “was many, many years and decades of peace.” Bannon also sometimes conflates his two species of bad capitalism, reducing them to a collective “unmooring” in which all transactions become financially engineered securitization opportunities, individuals are stripped of their inherent, spiritual value and objectified as commodities, and the “party of Davos” dictates its transcendent globalized will via centralized instruments of government that deprive ordinary men and women in the “heartlands” of nations around of the world of the opportunity to “comport their lives” as they see fit.

But, generally, so far, so good. There really is not much in this analysis to dispute. Indeed, if Bannon had been content to sit with this perspective on capitalism, which is almost anodyne, there might not be much to discuss. Even (or perhaps especially) with the infusion of a populist, class-war, pitchfork pungency, few Americans on the right or left would challenge the assumptions of this analysis. And clearly there are many sensible policies to restore foundations of an “enlightened” middle class capitalism that many politicians across the political spectrum would accept, under the right circumstances. But Steve Bannon is addressing a fringe Catholic organization at the Vatican, and we quickly learn that capitalism and poverty are not really his concerns, and that to the extent he argues for class warfare, the war he envisions is the middle class against the poor.

Judeo-Christian Apocalypse and Mayhem

We inhabit stratified physical and mental worlds, and what we quickly realize from his Vatican address is that Bannon’s economic ideas are superstructural to his ideas about cultural and spiritual decay. For Bannon, the foundations of enlightened capitalism and political freedom and stability are Judeo-Christian and Northern European. During this address, Bannon’s conversations about capitalism insistently veer off the rails to engage far more cataclysmic themes more in tune with Cardinal Burke’s conceptualizations of the culture of death associated with the secularization of the West, and with the vulnerability to unspeakable evils that Islam and the Caliphate can now access via this culture of death.

“Tough monk” Benjamin Harnwell politely rephrases Bannon’s downer screed regarding the existing crisis of church, faith, the West, and capitalism. “I am particularly struck by your argument, then, that in fact, capitalism would spread around the world based on the Judeo-Christian foundation is, in fact, something that can create peace through peoples rather than antagonism, which is often a point not sufficiently appreciated.” This perspective on the historically unique capacity of Judeo-Christianity to essentially spiritualize, via its commitment to the Imago Dei within each human, otherwise corrupt and insufficient political and economic institutions, is an important trope within the Catholic human dignity community (see items 5 and 6 of the Universal Declaration of Human Dignity).

But even when served this tennis lob, Bannon cannot bring himself to return serve without applying nasty and negative spin, the unmooring of capitalism from its Judeo-Christian foundations far more significant than his (vaguely Weberian) historical claim that when capitalism was “at its highest flower and spreading its benefits to most of mankind, almost all of those capitalists were strong believers in the Judeo-Christian West.” Bannon cannot wait to get to the main event, which features the claim (repeated over and over in his address) that “we’re at the very beginning stages of a very brutal and bloody conflict, of which if the people in this room, the people in the church, do not bind together and really form what I feel is an aspect of the church militant, to really be able to not just stand with our beliefs, but to fight for our beliefs against this new barbarity that’s starting, that will completely eradicate everything that we’ve been bequeathed over the last 2,000, 2,500 years.”

(III) The Metastasis of Steve Bannon

The unifying message of Steve Bannon’s 2014 Vatican address is omnidimensional global threat and looming apocalpyse. “We are in a crisis of the underpinnings of capitalism,” Bannon tells his audience, “and on top of that we’re now, I believe, at the beginning stages of a global war against Islamic fascism.”

Here’s how it all breaks down, according to Bannon. Ordinary, working-class, middle-class families who form the bedrock of the Tea Party movement and (conveniently) of Judeo-Christian, Western civilization are being crushed economically between a wealthy, arrogant, crony-capitalist overclass and an impoverished, dependent, dissolute underclass – both in their own ways sucklings of the state. At the same time, the virtuous way of life this middle-class materializes is threatened existentially by sub-human radical Islamists and deluded, amoral secularists – both in their own way enabled by the moral relativism and spiritual weakness of global elites, the dissolute underclass, and the theologically neutered state.

The Irony of Being Steve Bannon

There are many ironies here. Bannon associates the Judeo-Christian West with the best kind of capitalism – enlightened and middle class – which stands in opposition to crony capitalism associated with the global Davos/Wall Street set who have ransacked national borders and cultural boundaries. But the immigrant families he wants to deport – from Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa – tend to be precisely those most associated with the family-based, entrepreneurial capitalism he wants to protect and support.

Bannon also wants to deconstruct the administrative state (his biggest applause line at the CPAC conference in February). But in his Vatican address he advocates for the legislative restoration of the Glass-Steagall Act, which would presumably require significant regulatory and administrative oversight. “I think you really need to go back and make banks do what they do,” Bannon says. “Commercial banks lend money, and investment banks invest in entrepreneurs and to get away from … the hedge fund securitization, which they’ve all become basically trading operations and securitizations and not put capital back and really grow businesses and to grow the economy.” And of course, Bannon himself has willingly nuzzled at the teat of the Mercer family, whose immense fortunes derive from the Renaissance Technologies hedge fund.

Finally, the civilizational and economic critique that Bannon employs to explain the rise of “Tea Party”-like nationalist movements across the globe possibly applies more fully to other nations, and perhaps by a wide margin, than it does to the United States, which remains more economically resilient and robust, and safer from the impact of joblessness, poverty, migration, and terror attacks than Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

Perhaps one of the explanations for these ironies has to do with what we previously referred to as the things Bannon and the Tea Party “almost” get right – with their criticisms of globalization, arguments for economic and financial reform, skepticism about neoconservative/neoliberal (let’s just call it “Neo”) foreign interventions and nation-building, anxiety about what immigration trends, religious belief, and racial differences imply for national culture and identity. These are all important and challenging and appropriate concerns. That Steve Bannon is apparently more interested in a recursive Populist politics – stoking anxiety and fear and anger, rather than fully thinking through and actually solving these problems – tells us a lot about how and why he might lose his way politically once he (and Trump) had to create a positive policy program on top of this fear and anxiety and anger.

Emotional Seductions of the Meanstream Media

Steve Bannon’s loyalty to the Republican “base,” and to the promises Trump made to this base – regarding economic policy, trade nationalism, infrastructure, immigration, foreign policy, and traditional values – has, for now, marginalized him within the White House. In these confusing, Alice-in-Wonderland times, when up is down and down is up, we can’t know what this new status means for Bannon, or for the Trump presidency, or for American politics. This “not knowing” may or may not be the point for an administration and a political environment in which chaos is the norm, and perhaps/probably the goal.

There are a few things we do know, though. It certainly remains true that for Donald Trump the mechanisms and power of the presidency are only about addressing and restoring to precarious balance the interior feeling states of Donald Trump. We may presume Steve Bannon, useful to Donald Trump’s political ambitions as presidential candidate, and expert at adjusting Donald Trump’s feeling states as presidential candidate, entered the White House with enormous political and policy capital, which he has now squandered, not for any politically good reason except that he has been unable to translate his necromancer feeling state skills from the campaign trail to the institutions and mechanisms of government.

In the end, Bannon truly does hate the mainstream media, his foil throughout the campaign, and truly does love his base of disaffected Tea Party rabble. But we are learning that his White House boss only hates the mainstream media when they are the meanstream media – mean to him, at least – and only loves the Tea Party rabble – with its memestream media – so long as he needs them politically.

The Tea Party now having morphed into the Freedom Caucus on Capitol Hill – who turn out perhaps to be meaner than the mainstream media – Bannon’s capacity to serve Trump’s emotional needs is at odds with his own policy and loyalty commitments. Bannon may love a “gunfight,” but is almost certainly unprepared for the Jared-Ivanka pillow fight.

Illiberal Democracy and Radical Traditionalism

A Trump-Bannon parting of the ways may cast Bannon back into the wilderness, but perhaps he (and we) are learning the wilderness is where he thrives and belongs. With the full and unconditional support of Robert and Rebekah Mercer we may be sure he and his ideas are not going away any time soon, not in the United States and not in Europe and other parts of the world where “illiberal democracy” is now spuming the zeitgeist.

To the degree illiberal democracy remains in play, globally and in the United States, Bannon will remain nefariously relevant. And what this relevance means, we do clearly learn from his Vatican address, is ongoing promotion of the Radical Traditionalist ideology and worldview.

Radical Traditionalism confuses and disorients the mainstream media and mainstream voters, and is cognitively disruptive, because it challenges global liberal democracy via radically “illiberal” post-democratic, post-modern populist means – epitomized by the rise of the Internet troll; “fake news”; a “dear leader” despotism; a rife species of unhinged, paranoid and conspiracy-oriented thinking; and the descent upon our daily lives of an omnipresent fog of war.

At the same time, the “traditional” goals of the Rad Trad program – its ends – profoundly challenge the liberal democratic order via a decidedly pre-modern, pre-Enlightenment, neo-Thomist, natural law philosophy of community and conflict that takes, as its “self-evident” starting point, the idea of the human individual as theimago dei – a fraught, freighted Catholic concept that has become the pillar of the cultural revanchism and irredentism characteristic of illiberal democracy.

The Meta-State

In the Vatican address, Bannon repeatedly describes the war against jihadist Islamic fascism as a “metastasizing” cancer spreading to all corners of the globe. No region, no nation can afford to ignore this civilizational threat. What accounts for this metastasizing, cancerous growth of the Islamic State? According to Bannon (in perhaps an intended neo-Marxist irony) “the tools of capitalism” themelves have facilitated the metastasis of the Islamic State, by which he seems to mean the ways in which ISIS has made use of social media and online fundraising to recruit, cajole, intimidate, and terrorize.

In an extended riff on Vladimir Putin (whom Bannon regards as “quite an interesting character” and “very, very, very intelligent” and someone from whom we in the West can learn a lot concerning traditionalism and nationalism), Bannon also used the term “metastasize” to describe the significance of the ideas of Julius Evola and other radical traditionalists in the intellectual genealogy of fascism and, more recently of the pro-Russian “Eurasian” movement. Bannon sees these metastasizing ideas of radical traditionalism as elements of nationalist opposition to the pan-Europeanism of the EU or the centralized governance of the United States. He identifies radical traditionalism with “a states-based entity that the founders originally set up where freedoms were controlled at the local level.”

Bannon opens quite a can of worms with these statements, particularly with his ahistorical rendering of the US founding as a proto-fascist event. But I think we can reasonably assume he is not making an argument for a return to the Articles of Confederation. Indeed, given the Vatican venue for this talk, as well as the references to the “metastasizing” war between the Judeo-Christian West and the Islamic East and the “metastasizing” (and basically batshit-crazy) authoritarian and traditionalist ideas of Julius Evolo, it might be more fair and more accurate to suggest Bannon is advocating himself for a kind of hierarchical meta-state based on spiritual values and traditions to fill the vacuum left by any diminution of the centralized political state. A hierarchical meta-state not unlike the Roman Catholic Church, perhaps.

Prelude

At this moment in time, Steve Bannon is the most politically and intellectually significant vessel for the ideas powering the radical traditionalist / cultural nationalist / Tea Party insurgency in the United States. But he is merely prelude. The unraveling of his mind discloses a set of threads connecting us to the important historical, institutional, and individual sources of our present discontent. These threads include the “clash of civilizations” argument of Samuel Huntington, the Thomist natural law philosophy that has captured our politics and our courts, and the Catholic concept of theimago dei that may connect us to the Creator but at the cost of separating us from the Creation. More to come.

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. – Macbeth

I first drafted this essay nearly one year ago, following the annual meeting of the National Rifle Association in Indianapolis in April 2014. With the NRA now publicizing its 2015 annual meeting in Nashville, seems like a good time to revisit last year’s frenzied, speaking-in-tongues tent revival, along with some of the ideas on the relationship between guns and freedom prompted by NRA nuttiness. Because… ya know… nothing much has changed.

* * *

The National Rifle Association held its annual meeting in Indianapolis this weekend, which quickly devolved into a kind of last days ecstasy. Highlights included a day-long seminar on how to evade laws that restrict access to guns, the unveiling of a television advertisement that depicts the United States as a place where filthy crimes go unpunished and killers and con-artists prey upon anyone who still follows the rules, and Sarah Palin memorably telling us that waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists. The fierce piety that can allow NRA members to oorah to this chaos invites modest scrutiny.

1. Demographics

The demographics of gun ownership clearly are evolving, and they don’t favor gun owners, who are predominantly older white males in rural parts of the South and Midwest. In the next 50 years, the nation will become more urban and less white. More young people will grow up in an environment where there is no functional need to own a gun and where the idea of owning a gun seems alien. For these reasons, trend lines do not favor gun owners.

Of course, guns are prevalent with young minorities who live in cities, but gun possession among this population is largely associated with gangs and drugs. In other words, gun possession within this urban youth population is an immensely destructive accoutrement of youth, not an article of religious faith. Revamping our drug and incarceration policies to keep kids in school and out of jail, and to remove the market incentives for illegal drug trafficking, would likely make a big dent in the percentage of young minorities living in cities who possess firearms.

2. Protection

Notably, the percentage of Americans who say they own a gun for protection has risen precipitously at the same time that crime has fallen dramatically. For this reason, it is difficult to make the argument that the perceived need for “protection” is based in reality, on actual probabilities of meaningful threat. Instead, we must wonder whether the urge to own a gun for personal security rests more on a different, less concrete understanding of what constitutes a threat, and how best to handle that threat, whether it is imagined or real.

Guns give people the fantasy of control, not the reality of control, so to understand the firearms ownership obsession, we need to appreciate what fantasies are at work. For example, there is a significant fear among whites of black youths. But most violence involving young black males is seemingly geographically specific, committed against other black males, who more than likely know each other personally. This reality removes any reasonable argument for stand-your-ground laws, concealed weapons laws, open carry laws, and let’s-allow-guns-in-schools-parks-churches-and-bars laws.

3. Constitution

Second Amendment zealots appear not to understand how far they have removed themselves from the global mainstream when it comes to opinions about gun ownership. Citizens of other nations generally feel no need to own guns and their rate of gun violence is far lower than it is in the United States. For this reason, we should not underestimate how weird and creepy our national obsession with firearms appears to people in other countries around the world.

Appealing to an abstract “Constitutional” or “God-given” right to own guns in response to the condemnation of pretty much everyone else in the world really is not useful. Most legal scholars would agree our 225-year-old Constitution, which is one of the oldest in existence, and which has never had a fixed meaning but has always been in instrument of political conflict, is long-past due for an overhaul. The U.S. Constitution was drafted for a nation entirely different from the country in which we now live. As for our right to own guns being God-given, well, maybe we should let God speak for herself on this matter.Subscribe to the Politics email.How will Trump’s administration impact you?

4. Politics

People in the United States generally don’t question the need for our state governments to license both cars and their drivers. It is self-evident to just about everyone that cars in poor condition, or in the possession of the wrong people, become weapons that menace our safety.

The logic for gun-control laws is virtually identical to the logic for licensing cars and drivers. And so it should not surprise us that one of the biggest obstacles to reasonable gun-control laws, particularly in less densely populated states, is the outsized influence within their governing bodies of white, male, and rural representatives. It is precisely among these populations where one would expect the logic for regulating ownership and use of both firearms and motor vehicles to be almost equally suspect.

The intimidating rhetoric and organizational virtuosity of the National Rifle Association reinforces the rural-white-male bias within state legislatures. The effect has been to give interests favoring extreme gun rights disproportionate power to open the floodgates to gun ownership and to block laws that would enact even the mildest background check or gun safety provisions. Of course the other major source of influence in this debate, when one looks further under the skirts of the NRA, is the firearms industry.

5. Human Nature

Guns don’t kill people, people do.

When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.

For decades, gun rights advocates have parroted these slogans without really feeling any need to justify their claims logically or support them with evidence. Indeed, logic and evidence both clearly indicate that the abstract concept of a “person” is woefully inadequate for capturing the range of psychological circumstances and conditions to which every one of us is subject on a daily basis. At any given moment, even the most rational or disciplined or experienced among us is capable of acting irresponsibly or dangerously — out of rage or despair or incompetence or inattention or indifference.

We are imperfect beings. Put a perfect tool of destruction and mayhem in our hands, and you can well predict the havoc we are capable of unleashing.

6. Freedom

Gun rights advocates in the United States sequester their odd claims under the sheltering canopy of faith and freedom. Gun ownership has become a bizarre, frenzied religion. A cargo cult that worships the smooth barrel of a gun, a false idol, with its prosthetic, prophetic promise that we can blast our way into Heaven. The language of the Second Amendment has itself become fundamentalist literalism, obsessively parsed for divine meanings and prophecies, the authority that justifies itself. To paraphrase Sarah Palin, violence is how we baptize our enemies and confirm our freedom.

However, neither gun ownership nor the Second Amendment can confer, exalt, or secure freedom. Enhanced destructive capabilities do not make us free. Nor can we subsist on parchment freedoms inscribed in the Constitution. Indeed, to make a piece of technology or a piece of sheepskin the enabling condition for our freedom is to trivialize beyond recognition the meaning of freedom, and its importance to our nation.

Freedom is a spiritual condition of awareness, an intellectual endowment of foresight and reflection, a physical gift of health and wholeness, and a social capacity for conversation and communion. We are free when we can trust the spaces and the silences that separate us from our brothers and sisters, an interim that lets us fully see ourselves, and know ourselves, in the whites of their eyes and in the rise and fall of their breasts.

When complete, First Solar’s California Flats project will generate enough electricity to power Apple’s Cupertino headquarters complex, as well as its California stores and data centers. Many have hailed this agreement as a first step toward more widespread commercial adoption of solar power. After all, how can any company go wrong traveling in the footsteps of Apple? Energy that is less expensive, clean, water-efficient. A feel-good moment!

First Solar and Apple still have yet to answer a very important question, however. What will happen to the electronic waste?

What waste, ye say? Well, let me tell ye about the waste.

The California Flats Project, while only about the half the size of First Solar’s Topaz Farm (the world’s largest), will occupy nearly 3,000 acres of land (about 4.6 square miles) in the southeast corner of Monterey County, sufficient to generate solar power for the equivalent of 100,000 homes each year.

Solar is very surface-intensive. One interesting estimate calculates the surface area required to power the planet’s electricity needs in 2030 would blanket the entirety of Spain (lower estimates exist for global electricity demand as of 2010). You would need three hours to walk the circumference of the California Flats project site. Assuming comparable density, we would need 30,000 such solar farms to power the planet, and it would take you 40 years (based on a 40-hour week) to walk the circumference of all 30,000 sites.

Hang on to that 30,000 figure. We’ll return to it shortly.

To power this equivalent of 100,000 homes on its California Flats project site, on behalf of the electricity needs of Apple and PG&E, First Solar will need to install about 5 million PV modules, each about the size and weight of a 48-inch flat panel television. So a stack-equivalent of 5 million televisions rising 1,000 miles into the sky. Weighing 150 million pounds, Which is one-third the total of all of the digital products Apple has recycled in its history.

First Solar’s thin-film modules are made using Cadmium-Telluride (CdTe). The CdTe technology offers the promise of more energy-efficient, more flexible solar cells. However, CdTe represents a synthesis of two extremely toxic chemicals. The purpose of this article is not make any claims about the public health risks posed by the CdTe in the First Solar PV modules (for this debate, see my article, “First Solar’s Inconvenient Truth“). What I would like to point out, however, is that we are talking about 50 tons of CdTe spread evenly across 3,000 acres of land.

What will happen to these modules at the end of the useful life of the California Flats project (estimated to be about 25-30 years)? This is an important question, because to avoid laying waste to the land, First Solar and Apple and PG&E will need to assume responsibility for what’s called mitigation — disassembling the solar farm, removing and recycling the 5 million PV modules, and restoring the land to some facsimile of its prior state.

In 2008, First Solar company established a pre-funded recycling process that firmly established its leadership in the emerging conversation about appropriate producer responsibilities for solar energy’s external costs. Between July 2008 and November 2009, the company’s description of itself in press releases notably included this sentence: “First Solar set the benchmark for environmentally responsible product life cycle management by introducing the industry’s first pre-funded, comprehensive collection and recycling program for solar modules.”

In 2012, First Solar abandoned its commitment to pre-funded collection and recycling, shifting the burden of responsibility for managing the entire life-cycle of its solar farms largely to its clients. The company’s 2014 10-K annual report disclosed, “The percentage of modules sold that were subject to our solar module collection and recycling liability was 56 percent and 99 percent for the years ended December 31, 2014 and 2013 , respectively.” First Solar denies the end of its pre-funding commitment represents a step back from its focus on environmental responsibility, but of course it does. Solar technology is a subset of the semiconductor and electronics industries, and because of the size and quantity of the surface area covered by its panels, is poised to create more electronic waste in the 21st century than any other technology sector.

We’ve projected ultimate need for 30,000 solar farms equivalent to the California Flats project to meet global electricity demand by 2030. Using the California Flats installation as a benchmark, we can estimate that provisioning all 30,000 of these solar installations worldwide would require 150 billion modules, an unfathomably large quantity that, stacked, would weigh nearly 5 trillion pounds (2.5 billion tons) and stretch 30 million miles into space, or almost one-third of the way toward its power source, the sun. By comparison, total numbers of solar panels deployed globally to date probably don’t exceed 2 billion.This New WorldThe current capitalist system is broken. Get updates on our progress toward building a fairer world.

These projections are undoubtedly too high. Solar will not be the world’s only power source in 2030. Solar cell efficiencies will undoubtedly improve significantly in the next 15 years. So let’s (generously) reduce the 150 billion estimate by two-thirds, to 50 billion modules requiring fabrication, installation, management, and eventually decommissioning, collection, and recycling by 2060, less than 50 years from now. To put these numbers in perspective, the total weight of the solar PV modules for which we can reasonably expect deployment would exceed by a factor of 20 the 40 million tons of electronics waste generated globally in 2014 (most of which was not recycled). And these numbers only focus on PV installations through 2030.

So clearly we need to be mindful of the electronic waste risks associated with solar power, and we need to fold this awareness into our assessment of any high-profile project that accues significant public relations and financial benefits to the companies involved. Apple and First Solar both stand to gain enormously from the California Flats project. But what’s in the deal for the public if these companies do not assume, up front, the known costs of collecting and recycling the 5 million PV modules on the project site?

The track record for power plant decommissioning and toxic waste disposal, in the United States and elsewhere, indicates we should place no confidence in the assurances, verbal or written, of the companies that initiate, finance, construct, and profit from these projects. In general, these companies receive most of the benefits, but are able to shift the costs, in the form of litigation and clean-up expenses, to the public. For these reasons, the European Union imposed mandatory producer recycling rules for solar modules in 2012 (one of the reasons First Solar pretty much exited the European market and abandoned its own prefunding commitments in 2012), and most recently the Japanese government has announced the decision to draft new rules covering disposal and recycling of decommissioned solar and wind power facilities. In the case of Japan, the government has grown frustrated with problems of illegal dumping as equipment ages and breaks, and unsuccessful operators (of which there have been many) exit the industry under financial duress.

Prior to commencement of operations of the California Flats project, First Solar must submit a comprehensive recycling/disposal plan, including cost estimates, to Monterey County. The company must also post a bond with the county consistent with cost estimates. This requirement offers some reassurance. However, it is worth noting that as a result of its comments on the draft environmental impact report, First Solar was able to shift the sequencing of the submission of this report so that it was no longer a condition for issuance of the construction permits, but only a condition for issuance of operational permits. Given the momentum behind this project, one has to wonder what it would really take to prevent operations from commencing once construction is complete. Moreover, while First Solar emphasizes that the value of the materials in its panels creates powerful incentives to recycle as much of this material as possible, the test for the durability of any recycling commitment is really what happens if energy technologies evolve over the next 30 years and the materials have diminished value while the environmental impact of 5 million modules remains the same.

First Solar and Apple have publicly assumed the role of environmental stewards. All to the good. And they will deserve whatever benefits fall to them if they properly exercise their stewardship. The companies have the opportunity to set the standard for commercial adoption of solar, which would transform the economy and our nation’s energy consumption habits. But this standard must include explicit assumption of liabilities, including prefunding of these liabilities. To this degree, the obligations of First Solar and Apple are no different than the obligations of private companies that have assumed pension fund liabilities. One might say that solar PV collection, recycling, and disposal obligations for producers are fiduciary.